Tag Archives: italy

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about why it is that ownership is such a compelling concept. Not only with respect to our general human love of acquisition and possession, but more specifically concerning houses. Certainly if you have any grasp of math and are at all rational, you’d realize that owning a vacation home is often not a brilliant idea, financially.

Let’s do a little quick math on Godzillavilla. A rough figure of total investment for the done thing: € 250,000. That sum was, until recently, around 50% bigger when converted to the currency we earn in (Canadian dollars), but let’s not even think about that right now. Let’s just assume that we would visit every year for 25 years, which is about how many I might still be agile enough to cope with the stairs – that’s a cost per year of about €10,000. If we were there a minimum of 5 weeks a year, that could look fairly reasonable.

However, then we add taxes, maintenance, someone caring for the place when we’re not there, and emergency repairs due to acts of God or nature. Ah, you say, but if you rent it out all those things are covered and more. Yes, if you manage to rent it enough. Which will in turn create more maintenance, and the cost of a property manager to meet, greet and clean up after your guests.

Why rent this…

You see where I’m going with this. Home ownership is expensive and relentless. You can make the numbers add up, and lots of people do. Then I look at people who are renting, year-round, lovely homes in areas similar to ours, for less than €4,000 a year. We used to do this ourselves, when we lived in Milan. We had a place in the hills around Levanto for €3,600 and one in Courmayeur for slightly more. We co-rented a country villa in Chianti for about the same.

When you could OWN this?

So why on earth did we go and buy our own place – a ruin that that wasn’t even habitable?

It’s a darned good question, hence my lengthy contemplation of it. My conclusions about my motivations are not entirely flattering but neither are they entirely foolish, and I’ll bet they’re pretty common. I say ‘my’ because I don’t think I should speak for the rest of the family on this one, but I think I know what things drove me, personally.

One aspect had to do with transformation. I absolutely adore taking the latent beauty in a house or landscape and turning it into all it can be. As a family we’d done this for years, in fantasy form, with all kinds of abandoned houses in our travels around Italy. A ruined house of soft, old stone, a vine scrambling up the wall, the setting gorgeous, the view spectacular…it’s an absolute shame that such a thing is crumbling to pieces. I want to restore them all to their true beauty. I might have satisfied that need by becoming a contractor and doing it for other people, but in Italy as a foreigner that wasn’t really an option. And it wouldn’t satisfy reason number two –

Which had to do with nesting. When we bought the villa, we were renting in Milan. We’d been away from Canada for almost eight years, we’d sold our farm there, we’d lived in Milan for a bit, then the US, then back in Milan. Our rented house in Milan was lovely, even luxurious. Was I a spoiled brat for still wanting one that was our own, special place, regardless of where we might be earning our living? I wanted a place that made me sigh with the satisfied sense of truly being home, the moment it hove into sight. And that brings me to –

The biggest reason: the allure of possession. The (as it turns out, unfounded) belief that ownership bestows security – you will always have it, you can use it whenever you want, no-one can take it from you. The delicious idea that once you have restored its breathtaking beauty, it will be yours to have and to hold from this day forward. That you will forever have the opportunity to turn down its lane and heave that sigh, to walk through the door and greet its ghosts, to sit under the cherry tree and soak in the serenity of its valley.

I think it was a pretty good reason, actually. Even if it didn’t turn out to be true in our case. Even if it doesn’t make any sense. The dream of it still has great allure.

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One of the questions I get a lot is whether I had a terrible time trying to work with Italian workers and bureaucracy on the villa project. While this may disappoint people looking for a more juicy post, the answer is no. Why? We went local, and we had a great geometra.

The geometra is, in my opinion, the single most important decision you can make on an Italian reno project. Good ones know their way around the myriad regulations and filings, they know which contractors are good at what, which suppliers have the best windows, plasters, rafters, etc., who has the time to really devote to your project and who will try to charge you too much. They run the show on you behalf.

Fees are usually a fixed percentage of construction. This is, of course, something you want to work out ahead of time. But it’s money so well spent, it’s the last thing you want to haggle over.

Majordomo Nadia, project Queen

So how do you find a good one? As I mentioned before, it’s not through your real estate agent. We spent some time in our local community, asking around at bars and our new neighbours, and they directed us to Studio Ginocchio and the capable Nadia Silvano. The fact that she was part of the local fabric was as important as her professional skills, because when you start on a project like this, you begin to build a web of contacts and interdependencies that are just like a spider’s web: strong and delicate at the same time. No-one wanted to let Nadia down, and by extension no-one would let us down, either.

Not that we delegated completely and then disappeared. That was another important aspect of being able to get things done reliably. If you don’t make an effort to be present as much as possible, to be part of the community when you’re there, to care about who’s just had a baby and whose mother has just died, then no-one will care about the progress of your house in turn. But the number of times someone from whom I needed help asked me who the geometra was, and the way they always made an effort to give me what I needed when I said it was Nadia, convinced me of the importance of her role.

Advice: Find the geometra everyone loves. Love him/her in turn, treat them with respect (this should go without saying, but you’d be amazed), appreciate their knowledge, listen to them. They are your most important renovation asset!

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Godzillavilla sits in the most beautiful of landscapes. With pear and fig, a bounty of delightful wild irises, and a billowing cloud of cherry blossom in the spring, it’s hard to believe that evil lurks in their very midst. I could be talking about the biancaspine (black locust). I will actually talk about them another time.

But no, this form of evil is such a good actress, the first time I saw it as a small vine I thought, my how delicate and pretty that is. Such innocence.

It sports a wee white flower in spring, to add to the deception.

It was very hard to imagine, when I first laid eyes on this sweet thing, that it bore any relation to the Tarzan-sized vines that dripped from all the trees, right to their crests, the stalks the width of my arm. But, like Rosemary’s baby, these young mites grow into true horrors.

All grown up and taking over the valley.

This weed, which the locals call glycine (wisteria) but which looks more like a clematis with super powers, had plenty of time to take over the property before we bought the place and began our machete war against its tyranny. My mother, who was a master of the quaint phrase, would no doubt refer to our feeble efforts as ‘farting against thunder’.

None-the-less, we hack away every year with the intention that it at least won’t get any further. Despite the obvious futility, it feels noble.

Creeping its way towards villa domination.

This used to be an open orchard.

Waves of evil: what looks like ground cover is actually the vines that have formed a canopy over the entire orchard, killing everything underneath.

Ain’t nature grand? That willingness of the land to produce the lush growth we prize for our loveable plants turns out to be completely without bias; it nurtures the nasty just as vigorously as the lovely. Some day we’ll pay someone who has the proper equipment – full vegetation hazmat suit with face screen, and a diesel-powered weed-whacker with a deadly steel blade – to get rid of it totally. Until then, we grab our machetes and think noble thoughts.

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And you thought I might be talking about an old rock group. Nope. Just in case you didn’t get enough of a workout trying to figure out which window options were going to be best, here’s your chance to think about doors, too. Three entry doors need to have decisions made about their surrounding frame. We’re not even talking about the actual door itself yet, just the way we finish the hole. And yet…this too is important.

Door number one is the main entrance. Door number two is right beside it, and leads to the old torre (which will remain a garden shed at ground level). Door number three we’re not even looking at yet, because it’s the one off the kitchen. Yes, it’s that one that used to have a bathroom attached until Marcia became a demon with a sledgehammer and removed the room. We’ll deal with that later.

The main entrance (middle), with the shed/torre entrance to its left.

The shed doorframe magically holds together with very little mortar, like old teeth you expect might pop from their gums at any moment.

The main door. Those slabs of stone at the sides used to constitute the frame, but on their skinny edges (you can see it in the top photo, where they are still intact). They fell out, and revealed a nice curve at the top. I like the width of them the way I’ve set them on either side here to check proportion.

Now for some examples of what other people have done with their doors, to see how confused we can all get.

The width of this surround gives the door a great presence and balances it. I like the roughness of the old stone, which looks like it’s seen a thing or two. Beautiful, subtle details in the little groove and the rounding of the inner edge, as well as the wedge in the centre of the lintel section.

Another door with the edge detail.

This place, showing off again (it’s in Varese Ligure). The lintel shape is similar to Godzillavilla’s with that slight curve, but our doors have a more stout proportion (dare I say short and wide?). The wedge detail looks good here, too.

A rough stone frame, also on the thinner side. I know people say one can never be too thin (or too rich), but I’m not sure the rule applies to door frames. Might work for the shed.

And last but not least – although a little too rustic for the main entry, this has gobs of charm for the shed. Its framing stones are ten times the size of our shed’s puny little old-man-teeth stones. We do have plenty of larger chunks on the property if we wanted to remake it, though.

That’s it! Comments, please. Someday we will even get to agonize over what kind of doors go inside these lovely holes we’re working on.

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Not that we actually need to make this decision yet, but it’s never too early to fantasize. This week’s fantasy is finished windows to go in those lovely holes that are waiting for them. The question is window colour and – even further down the road – shutter colour.

We have some restrictions on our house due to its age and the area we’re in, but that’s fine by me. The choices for the windows are essentially white or wood. The shutters can be green, wood, or brown.

White windows can look nice and fresh against a mass of stone – although I think the brown shutters distract from that effect. I’m not a big fan of brown shutters.

Classic wood window with green shutters. The green does seem to balance all that natural tone quite nicely.

But then – even with a house that’s shut up – wood shutters are so subtle against stone. This is why I flip-flop about it so much.

This is a terrible shot, but you get to see wood versus green shutters together.

And I throw this in only to show the practicality of having shutters of classic Ligurian construction; they open in multiple partial configurations, like transformers, so you always get just the right mix of breeze and light. Ingenious.